The murder of Jo Cox | ASSASSINS

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]It's around lunchtime, 16th of June, 2016. Thomas May walks down the same road he's walked down since he was a kid. He's wearing a gray shirt and a white baseball cap. No one pays much attention to the large duffel bag he's carrying. He makes his way to the Burst Town Square where he hangs around munching on a chocolate bar. After a few minutes, he continues to the library.

[00:00:28]He waits out the front until a small silver car pulls up. Three people get out, a woman and two of her staff. Joe Cox is here for a weekly meet up with constituents. Anyone can turn up for a one-on-one chat with their local MP. As she heads towards the library, Thomas May steps out of a shadow behind her. He pulls out a gun from his coat. It's a sornoff 22 caliber bolt-action rifle. He points it straight at Joe Cox. Witnesses heard him shout things like, "This is for Britain. Britain first." He fires from close range and she hits the ground. Injured but alive. May bends down and drags Cox by her hair to a space between two parked cars. She tries to sit up, but he stabs her in the chest, lungs, and stomach. One of Cox's staff scream at him to get away from her, that she has two young children at home. The other remains nearby and calls out for help. A brave bystander tries to intervene, but May stabs him in the stomach and he collapses. May steps away. Seems like he's done, but then one of Cox's staff rushes forward to fend him off with a handbag. Joe Cox immediately shouts out, "Get away, you two. Don't let him hurt you. Let him hurt me. Her words seem to stir May to action. He shoots her twice and stabs her again. Joe Cox has been shot three times and has 15 stab wounds. At some point, Mayor yells again, "This is for Britain." And then he walks away completely calm. One of Cox's staff members cradles her in her lap and asks if she can get up. She says she can't, that she's in too much pain. Those would be her last words. Less than an hour after she stepped out of her car to meet with the public, Joe Cox is dead.

[00:02:38]Police soon find May and corner him in a culdeac. According to their testimony, he raises his arms when he sees them and says, "It's me." As he's being arrested, he tells the police, "I'm a political activist."

[00:03:01]Hello, my friend. I'm Alan Pahari and this is Assassins, the show where we tell the stories of the world's most shocking assassinations.

[00:03:10]And today, the murder of a young British MP, Helen Joanne Cox, or as she's more commonly known, Joe Cox. Britain was in the grip of its biggest political decision in decades, to leave or remain with the European Union. The Brexit vote ended up being less about trade rules and more about the very identity of Britain itself. Today, how a member of Parliament found herself fatally at odds with one of her constituents.

[00:03:42]On the 3rd of June 2015, 40-year-old Joe Cox gives her maiden speech to the House of Commons in London, right in the middle of the Brexit debate. Her parents watch from the public gallery as she talks about her electorate.

[00:03:57]Battly and Spain is a gathering of typically independent nononsense proud Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration be it Irish Catholics across the constituency or Muslims from Indian Gujarat or Pakistan principally from Kashmir. And whilst we celebrate our diversity, the thing that surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.

[00:04:27]>> Corks would later speak of a moral obligation to treat refugees and migrants with compassion. But she also sees the benefits migrants bring, contributing to the British economy, fueling growth, breathing life back into shrinking towns. Joe Cox was born and bred in one of these towns, Patley, in the West Yorkshire region of Northern England. Her father worked in a toothpaste and hairspray factory in the region, and her mother was a secretary at a local school. Cox was academically gifted and managed to get into a selective state school. From there, she went to Cambridge University in the 1990s.

[00:05:06]Cox was the first person from her family to go to uni, let alone one of the most prestigious in the country. In that elite institution, her modest background stood out. But it's that very background in West Yorkshire that shapes her as an adult. West Yorkshire is a hugely diverse working-class area with a large Muslim population. There are big Indian and Pakistani communities in her electorate, and Joe Cox loves it.

[00:05:33]Everywhere she goes within it, she sees the benefits of immigration.

[00:05:40]Thomas Mayer's hometown of Burstl is less than a 10-minute drive from where Joe Cox grew up. Born 11 years before Cox, May has a different take on their shared community. He hates what he sees happening around him. Unlike Joe Cox's town, Burstl is predominantly white. For example, only 5% of people under 18 are of South Asian descent. But in Joe Cox's home of Batley, that number is 60%. What the two had in common was that they both grew up in working-class families.

[00:06:15]Thomas May spent most of his childhood living with his grandparents. They both passed away, but he still lives in the same house alone now. Mayor's mother was a teenager when she had him. one of the reasons his grandparents raised him. But he still sees her often, sometimes for Sunday lunch or helping her with her grocery shopping. His dad's pretty much always been out of the picture.

[00:06:40]June 16, 2016. Barely an hour after Joe Cox's death, a police constable enters Mayor's Bastal home. His colleagues follow him in and they fan out. The home is small, but it's neat. Things are laid out in an orderly fashion. Tins of canned food are lined up precisely in the pantry, their labels all facing outwards in the same direction. As the officer rifles through May's things, he hears his colleague shout from a bedroom to come and look at something. Next to a small bed, there's a bookshelf with books on German military and Nazi history and the Third Reich. And on top of the bookshelf, a statue of a golden eagle with a swastika on it. There's also a dossier on Joe Cox. It has printouts of an article she's written and a page from her website. The white race, Mayor wrote, was about to go through a quote very bloody struggle. In the days before the murder, Mayor was googling serial killers at his local library. He was reading up about the Ku Klux Clan. He even looked up MP Ian Gao who was murdered back in 1990. By this point, we know that May has gotten his hands on a gun. He asks Google, "Is a.22 caliber round deadly enough to kill with one shot to a human's head?"

[00:08:07]In the weeks before Joe Cox is assassinated, the Brexit campaign is getting tense. Because this vote isn't just about regulations imposed by the European Union. It's about who's allowed to live and work in the UK. For some in the leave camp, it's about keeping Britain British. They don't want an ever closer union with Europe, and they don't want immigrants from the EU to come into Britain. They increasingly rely on racially charged rhetoric to make their point. The British Nationalist Party claims that Muslim immigrants are failing to integrate. They warn of foreign rape gangs on British soil, attacks on British girls, and cover-ups by the political class. They say there are now effectively no go zones in British suburbs, and that immigration imports tension and violence from foreign conflicts.

[00:09:03]Those in the remain camp say that fears around immigrant crime are overblown.

[00:09:08]exaggerated.

[00:09:09]But beyond the racially charged conflict, British citizens are doing it tough. Health care is increasingly expensive and unreliable. Rents are skyhigh. Many of the things Britain's grew up taking for granted are now dwindling away. They're getting squeezed and many are convinced that drastic action is needed. Thomas May is one of those people.

[00:09:39]The United Kingdom is in shock, but some people celebrate Joe Cox's death. An examination of over 50,000 tweets in the UK find words like hero, traitor, and white power in the top 20 most common phrases to describe her murder. Online, the killing is characterized by neo-Nazis as mayor's sacrifice for the cause. Thomas Mayer is sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, but ultimately May got what he wanted.

[00:10:13]Britain leaves the European Union. Joe Cox's electorate of Battley and Spen votes to leave too. When police interview Thomas Mayer's family and neighbors, they all say he didn't really talk about politics and they never suspected that he was a racist. After all, his halfb brotherther Dwayne is a mixed race, and they seem to have gotten on just fine. Dwayne himself seemed shocked that Mayor could have done something like this. I guess none of these people had seen his search history or the stuff inside his house. They all just accepted him for what they thought he was, a social recluse.

[00:10:53]But there was one group of people who suspected something dark lurked behind May's quiet exterior. The local taxi operators. Before Joe Cox's assassination, they'd made a number of complaints about May's racist remarks during taxi trips. One of them told the media that Cababies didn't want to pick him up. He said mayor would order a taxi and right at the end when he was about to be dropped off, he'd make racist comments to the drivers. He said, quote, "We always thought he was a racist."

[00:11:30]Thank you for watching, my friend. What do you think was behind May's turn to terrorism? Tell us in the comments.